In spite of Dr. Bruening’s reassuring speech, Germany’s political situation is undergoing such changes behind the scenes that hopes and fears of a Hitler-Bruening coalition are openly expressed, the “Observer” reports to-day from Berlin.
President von Hindenburg’s influence in the matter, it says, is referred to openly.
When Hitler visited him, the paper says, Hindenburg is understood to have pointed to Dr. Bruening as an “exemplary patriot”, and Hitler, in an open letter to Dr. Bruening, addressed the Chancellor as a “nationally minded man”. President Hindenburg has evidently assured himself personally that if the Hitler party come into power they will undertake reforms by legal methods-which may be taken to mean that they will doubtless use the dictatorial powers of Paragraph 48 of the Republican Constitution to pass any measures they please in the same manner as the present Cabinet has done.
Why this eventual coming into power of the Hitlerites has to be reckoned with, although Catholic party leaders would wish it otherwise, has been proved by this week’s triumph of the Nazis in the municipal elections in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. This is their fourth great triumph since the present Reichstag, with the sweeping Nazi majority, was elected and has existed almost permanently in recess. To-day in Germany any election in the smallest Federal State or province is eagerly watched as barometer of the general political situation.
It is pointed out, in other than Nazi quarters, that these four elections all took place in pre-eminently Protestant neighbourhoods, and that therefore the balance of the Catholic Party, as restraining power in the middle, between extremes of Right and Left, was not experienced. But while the Left has suffered, as usual, a loss of voters to the Communists, the Right, and particularly the legitimate Nationalist Right, has been decimated.
Germany sees herself therefore no longer faced with a Eugenberg problem, the “Observer” explains, but with a Hitler problem -Eugenberg, the die-hard Tory, steel, press and film magnate, who has been losing money heavily of late in the present financial crisis, and Hitler, who scorns property on a large scale, who dislikes Gentile managing directors as much as Jewish financiers.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
